Books |
The Quality of Life Report
Meghan Daum
By
Published: Jan 01, 2005
Category:
Fiction
"The Quality of Life Report" might well appeal to the women who read chick lit. On the other hand, it might appeal equally strongly to women who wouldn’t be caught dead reading the fictional equivalent of Cosmo. It even might appeal to…men.
Why? Because the defining fact about Meghan Daum is not that she is female — it’s that she’s smart. And achingly funny. Put smart and funny together, and you have me at hello.
Lucinda Trout — the fictional stand-in for Daum — is a junior TV producer in New York City. She makes $31,900 doing segments for "New York Up Early." She lives in a one-windowed apartment. She has a degree in l9th century American literature from Smith; by now, she thinks, she should be working for NPR or PBS. Instead, she does reports of takeout sushi and what it’s like to wear a thong all day (or, "can you learn to live with a permanent wedgie?). In her off-hours, she wonders what happened to yogurt ("It just went away") and the disappearance of gold jewelry ("When was the last time you saw a gold wedding band?").
Then she gets an assignment to investigate crystal meth — "coke for the Payless shoes set" — in the Heartland. She flies out to "Prairie City." The radio plays Peter Frampton. Most of the women are…super-sized. They wear Birks and harem pants. They give "menopause showers" for middle-aged friends. Restaurant food tastes "like lunch at a school cafeteria."
And yet there’s something appealing about Big Sky country. A good apartment is $475 a month. On a lark, she arranges to do a year of reporting — "The Quality of Life Report" — for her New York show on what life is like in Alien America. And off she moves to Prairie City.
Naturally, she meets a man.
"Are you a serial killer or anything?" she asks.
"Other than that one time, no," he says.
He works in an elevator — a grain elevator. He has no checking account. He has three kids by a confusing array of women. But he’s funny. And he looks like Sam Shepard.
Lucinda goes for it. "I harbored a sense that, like an affair with a cabana boy during a vacation, nothing I did in Prairie City quite counted." She’s wrong, of course, and we know it, and that is part of the charm of the book — watching the re-education of a New York smarty.
The jokes — and there are many — are on Lucinda. The best comes at a barn dance. It involves a horse. It is so funny that I laughed until I couldn’t breathe. Another minute and the coroner would have listed, under Cause of Death, "Meghan Daum."
A quick read. A smart read. Laughs galore. In her first novel, Meghan Daum has produced so many entertaining moments that this book would be a bargain at twice the price.
To buy "The Quality of Life Report" from Amazon.com, click here.
